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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

For anyone considering going to this: There's not much to see. It's basically the short stone obelisk you see in the picture, sitting in an otherwise unremarkable desert. (A fence encloses maybe an acre of surrounding land, but things look the same inside as out.) There's a small one-story home a few miles away where the original test was viewed from that you can go inside, but it's also unremarkable.

I'm really glad I went, but it's more of an intellectual pilgrimage than anything else.

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I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: A vast Obelisk of stone Stands in the desert... near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a metal drum lies, whose thickness, And shape, and awe inspiring scale, Tell that its sculptor well the intent read to let survive within these lifeless things, The force which they had summoned;

And on the pedestal these words appear: 'I am become death, the destroyer of worlds' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The glassified green sands stretch far away

Yeah. That's what it's like.

I've been to Trinity and to Hiroshima. Both shake me from someplace deep.

Brilliant comment, thank you.

Yeah I've also been. It's not one of those 'you have to be there' things. If you happen to be in Albuquerque or Socorro* for some reason: yeah check it out; it's not worth more than an hour drive.

*Was in Socorro myself, honestly not even sure it's worth the drive from Albuquerque unless you're a real atomic bomb fanatic.

I went last year. Socorro was itself a world of its own.

I’m curious what your impressions were?

Socorro’s got odd and unexpected history throughout it, I found.

It wasn't a positive impression. The town seemed like many other rural towns, especially in New Mexico. Dying. The Burger King was out of lettuce and ketchup, the Wall Mart was... interesting, and the motel I stayed in was pretty terrible. Add to that a wind storm in the middle of the night -- hot wind -- a parking lot with no lighting, and my Chihuahua that needed to go potty at 4am.

This reads like the first paragraph of short story.

My Chihuahya at ground zero. Obelisk is in the background. :)

https://imgur.com/a/5Q0PDkV

Interesting how?

To be fair, there is slightly more than that. There will be a series of displays that have information about the Manhattan Project. Normally, there's also some displays with a small amount of trinitite. That said, yes, there's not much there, which was partly why it was a good spot for the test. The Nuclear Museum on Eubank in Albuquerque has far more information about the project in case anyone is interested.

By the way, if you head east on 380 through the Valley of Fires, there was a soda fountain in Carrizozo where the proprietor was a little boy when the test went off. He remembers the blast, which could be heard from the city. I just did a quick check and it may be closed now. He was getting up in age and it'd be sad if he passed.

The series of displays aren't historical objects (with, I guess, the exception of trinitite), they are just a poor method of giving very basic background info. Time would be better spent reading Wikipedia.

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